Minutes passed. John paid out rope and hose. The deckhands cranked the air pump faster. The only sign of Charles was the periodic ripple of bubbles filtering up from below. John knew that the deeper Charles dived, the larger those bubbles would grow as the air exhaled from the helmet expanded on its way to the surface. When the roil of bubbles beside the ship doubled in size, John knew Charles had gone past 30 feet.

John released more rope and the crew doubled the action at the pump. Sixty feet. Seventy feet. At 80 feet, the rope stopped unwinding. John gave a tug and waited for Charles to return the sign. The brothers had agreed on a simple code. One tug from above meant “Are you OK?” One from below answered yes. Two tugs from Charles was a request to pay out more rope. Three tugs signaled that valuable salvage was ready to be hoisted to the surface. And constant tugging was an SOS, an emergency call to be pulled up immediately. Following John’s query down the line, there was nothing. Another moment, noresponse. Then, after a pause that felt endless, John sensed one single, solid tug. 

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Back on the surface, John felt three quick tugs on the signal line. It was the message he’d been dreaming of for years: valuable salvage secured. John reeled in the slack of Charles’ rope and air hose as Charles ascended, moving quickly, from 60 to 50 to 40 feet. Still, John saw only bubbles—until he glimpsed movement below, a hazy gold shimmer that brightened and grew and eventually resolved into a ghostly figure slowly climbing the submerged rope ladder. The figure was accompanied by a garland of silver bubbles, swirling around what John knew to be Charles’ copper helmet, which still seemed almost distant when it suddenly burst through the surface.

Charles lurched up the ladder and onto the deck, and John helped pull off his helmet. When Charles caught his breath, he explained what he’d seen: the darkness, the ship, the fortune in cannons. A new era was dawning. That vast, impenetrable territory could now be seen through the glass of the Deanes’ helmet. Charles’ submerged steps on the rotting deck of the Royal George would eventually make all the Earth’s surface part of man’s domain, subject to exploration—and exploitation.

But for the moment, the Deanes were focused on recovering their booty below. It took hours for the brothers to haul that first cannon to the Portsmouth jetty, but the effort was worthwhile: The gun weighed 5,800 pounds, and it was in perfect condition, still loaded with shot.

Over several weeks, the brothers would take turns diving back down to the seafloor. They were able to recover an additional 23 cannons before the weather turned bad and forced them back to land. Altogether, the guns were worth approximately 10,000 pounds, roughly $1.25 million today.

And that was just the Royal George; the brothers immediately understood the broader financial implications of their jaunt off the shore of Portsmouth. They could soon move on to the centuries of wrecks around the British Isles, ships of all sizes and eras loaded with silver, jewels, gold bullion, and valuable artifacts—tens of millions of dollars, there for the taking. And Charles and John were, for the moment, the only people capable of reaching them with any consistency and safety. In an instant, they knew, their lives had been transformed. They were now wildly, ecstatically rich.

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As winter set in and diving wrecks at sea became impossible, Charles chartered a boat and sailed up the Thames. It was just before Christmas—December 18, 1834—and he passed within miles of his old home in Deptford Green before anchoring in front of the Royal Hospital School. Almost three decades earlier, the Deane brothers had been objects of charity. Now fortunes had changed. Charles was returning to the scene of his impoverished childhood to demonstrate for his teachers, neighbors, and family how the young dreamer Deane had made something of himself.

The Royal Hospital School sits on the
banks of the Thames.

Children streamed from the school to witness Charles’ arrival as he rolled out one of the salvaged Royal George cannons—loaded with shot “as clean and perfect as the moment it came from the foundry,” wrote a local reporter—and lit the fuse. The 85-year-old weapon fired with a dramatic report. Later that day the bells of Deptford and Greenwich rang merry peals in Charles’ honor.

It was a hero’s homecoming, but an incomplete one. John was not in attendance. Charles had not invited his brother. In their days at the Royal Hospital School, the boys had been so close. Now, after their mutual triumph in engineering and discovery, they kept their distance from each other. Their success at sea summoned wealth from the depths, but along with it arose resentments that had been building for years.

Throughout their youth, John was the better student, rose higher through the ranks as a sailor, and had many friends. Charles was the man of ideas, but his diligent younger brother was the one getting noticed, the one who had found some measure of accomplishment. Their opposing traits, although complementary, wore into bitterness. Charles had needed his brother to complete the helmet—the invention reflected both of their personalities, equal parts practical and wildly inventive—but after so many years overshadowed by John, Charles wanted to claim credit for himself. John had by now dived in the helmet more than his brother, but Charles explained to all how the invention was solely his. When he came ashore to greet the crowds in front of the Royal Hospital, he talked about his journey to the bottom of the sea in his extraordinary new invention, but he never once mentioned his brother.

After decades living in John’s shadow, Charles wanted the spotlight for himself. He commissioned a series of oil paintings depicting his maritime triumphs and announced an elaborate exhibition at the Cosmorama, one of the West End’s most fashionable salons.

He titled the show Spoils of the Ocean and printed self-congratulatory posters heralding:

Mr. Deane, the inventor of the celebrated
diving apparatus for traversing the bottom
of the ocean, invites the attention of the public
to his novel exhibition.

For an admission price of one shilling, visitors could mingle with Charles and hear him recount his tales of adventure. He had filled the hall with a salvage menagerie of the Royal George’s guns, copper, and cannons. He even included an iron pot still filled with the beef bones set to stew when the battleship sank, and other “Relics of the unfortunate Sufferers.” Paintings of Charles exploring the wreck flanked the elaborate display, from which any depiction of John was notably absent.

Charles’ revisionism worked. Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post referred to him as

“this ingenious gentleman, whose
diving apparatus is so perfect
a nature that the bottom of the ocean
is with him as dry as land.”

The aged admiral Philip Durham, one of only two officers to survive the sinking of the Royal George, visited the exhibition and expressed “his approbation” and “good wishes for the success” of the show. Nautical Magazine published a glowing review. “Our readers have heard of Mr. Deane, and his extraordinary submarine operations on the Royal George,” the editors wrote, and went on to proclaim that

“the enterprising and truly national character of
[Charles’] labours will ensure him that cordial and generous support
from a British public which he so fully deserves.”

The London Times was similarly enthusiastic:

“The person to whom the government
and the public are indebted for the recovery
of these things is Mr. Deane.”

Charles was becoming a national hero.

The public grandstanding may have gratified Charles, but it also alerted the world to his methods. Now anyone could read in the newspaper about the Deane brothers’ exploits. Soon, three separate manufacturers began producing helmets strikingly similar to the Deanes’. Lloyd’s, the giant insurer, offered handsome commissions to anyone willing to reclaim valuables from sunken ships that it had insured. Enterprising sailors across the United Kingdom, and soon Europe, took up the challenge, sparking a 19th-century deep-sea gold rush. One of the first to produce a Deane helmet knockoff was Augustus Siebe, the former watchmaker who’d manufactured the original Deane smoke and diving helmets. In subsequent years, Siebe would build a brisk manufacturing trade around diving equipment, carrying his name into history despite Charles and John having given him the original design.

While Charles basked in public acclaim, John saw danger in the competition and set off on his own to beat rival divers. Over the next few years, he dived isolated sites in the North Sea and sailed farther south to dive the Duke of Marlborough, a sunken trading vessel with cargo valued at $3.5 million today. He learned how to use explosives to detonate ships half-buried in the mud, allowing them to offer up their bounty. He ventured along the west coast of Ireland and dived the Lady Charlotte, a large freight vessel driven ashore while sailing from Peru to Liverpool. In just a few weeks of diving, John recovered gold, dollars, and silver worth more than $11.2 million today.

While exploring near the Royal George, John discovered a ship whose cannons were engraved with a rose-and-mitre insignia and the words henricus vii, which identified it as the Mary Rose, a Tudor warship that sank in 1545 in defense of Henry VIII’s England against France. John began salvage operations and managed to pull up four more cannons.

The spectacular find eclipsed the brothers’ salvaging of the Royal George; this was not a ship from living memory—the Mary Rose had vanished centuries earlier, in an infamous naval battle. As the newspapers turned their attention to John and the Mary Rose, the focus on Charles faded, putting him once again in the shadow of his brother.

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9

Eighteen thirty-six was a difficult year for Charles. His wife, Sophia, and his two youngest daughters—Royal Georginia and her younger sister, Jane, both still toddlers—died within a one-month period when typhus swept through London. Charles, now 40 years old, was devastated. His mind seemed scattered; his plans became erratic. When the Admiralty, which had authority over the Royal George, asked Charles to recover further salvage, his response was incoherent.

A wealthy Irishman met Charles on his travels and described some of his oddities. Charles appeared to be fascinated by marine flora and was “engaged in tearing away seaweed from the rocks on which he was walking.” Charles also liked to theorize about “the effect of the Drummond light in submarine illuminations, while observing the sun gleaming down through the water.”

Charles was likely suffering the effects of nitrogen poisoning. The Deane helmet, with its revolutionary open design, saved the brothers from squeeze and other injuries, but they did not realize that the greatest danger was invisible.

Pressurized air within the helmet was saturating Charles’ muscle tissues with nitrogen. When it was time to climb back to the surface, the nitrogen would expand and bubble into his bloodstream. With brief exposure, nitrogen bubbles might trigger headaches, vomiting, and numbness. After prolonged exposure from very deep and long dives, the bubbles could induce rashes, strokes, seizures, paralysis, insanity, and death. These ailments would later be dubbed “the bends,” because the condition doubled up victims in extreme pain.

Among the earliest generation of divers, dozens of men reported shattering pains of all kinds after long dives. Some vomited bloody foam, while others lost use of their limbs and began dying. “A sharp pain shot like lightning through my lower extremities,” wrote one helmet diver. “The next instant it went through my whole system, so prostrating me that I could not move a limb, or even a muscle…. The best physicians pronounced me incurable…. It was five tedious months before I could step; and in the spring I was only so far recovered as to walk a very little with crutches.”

Physicians of the era were ignorant of the cause and often did more harm than good, administering remedies like leeches or turpentine enemas. Some doctors recommended divers might take “some therapeutic Cognac” upon resurfacing, a stiff drink being a common treatment for misunderstood maladies.

Modern medicine would later learn how the absorption of nitrogen into the bloodstream could cause physical afflictions and permanent brain damage. The bends turn out to be a fickle illness. They can manifest among two physically similar divers in vastly different ways. Charles was arguably the oldest working helmet diver in the world; he’d spent countless hours diving deep and drinking heavily at taverns—factors making him more susceptible to the bends. John, who was younger, disciplined, and sober, would dive twice as often as Charles, to even greater depths—downward of 140 feet—and stay underwater for more than five hours at a time with never a single ailment. Even today, scientists can't predict the exact time or depth at which divers will suffer the bends. Sometimes it’s genetics; sometimes it’s dumb luck.

In the Deanes’ day, it was also unknown that nitrogen poisoning had a cumulative effect: The more time divers spent underwater and the deeper they went, the more nitrogen they would absorb. The Deane brothers had helped to open a new realm for humanity to roam, but a life beneath the surface could exact a terrible price. Over time, the bends could drive a man insane.

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10        

It was only four years after the successful dives on the Royal George that Charles’ ailing health forced him into a kind of retirement. Eventually his joints would ache so deeply that he walked with a cane. He spent his time brooding and carrying on about the many perceived maltreatments that chased away success. He rarely dived anymore and bemoaned the failure of his lawsuits against various competitors for patent infringement. His patent only covered the use of the suit as a “smoke helmet” and said nothing about diving. Charles was once again edging toward bankruptcy.

Near penniless and losing his grip on sanity, Charles announced in August 1838 that he would once again dive the Royal George, this time without John. If the wreck had made him rich and famous once, perhaps it could repeat the trick. This time he would lead a small crew and do all the diving himself, proving to all his own mettle without the aid of his brother.

He left London and took a cheap room near Portsmouth Harbor, a place notorious in England for disease and vice. At night, drunken sailors bartered with prostitutes and scavengers scooped horse and human waste from gutters to sell as fertilizer. By day, Charles dragged his broken body to the wharf and set sail for the Royal George. He arrived in position and plunged to the depths again, but this was a different ship than the one he’d seen years prior. John and other divers had salvaged all the easy pickings. Charles spent three arduous months diving alone, threshing through the broken ship, but there was only debris and ragged flax linen torn from the sails. As winter set in, Charles had salvaged nothing.

“I have become a great sufferer,” Charles wrote the Admiralty in a desperate plea for employment. Charles explained that he had hoped his diving apparatus “would prove a source of benefit to me after all my toils, but owing to the invention being copied and manufactured by many others … I do therefore most humbly submit my case in hopes your Lordships will be pleased to take my request into consideration in giving me an Appointment.” As in his youth, Charles required charity, but now there was none forthcoming.

The Admiralty had nothing for him, and Charles was left to wander the streets of London hunched over, his sanity unraveling. At times, he was still struck by the illuminations of an inventor’s mind, and he sketched out new ideas—a pneumatic subway, a rapid-fire cannon system, a waterborne vehicle that would have been a kind of precursor to the Jet Ski—but without John such things could never materialize. As Charles’ grasp on reality loosened, his family committed him for a time to the Peckham House Lunatic Asylum. When Charles’ son was asked on a school form to name his father’s profession, the boy wrote a single word: insain.

Broken and despondent, Charles was admitted to the
Peckham House Lunatic Asylum in 1839.

Whatever treatments Charles was offered by the asylum doctors over the years did little good. On the morning of November 7, 1848, Charles was living in London’s seedy Limehouse district. Over the previous few days, he had suffered delusions that unknown persons wanted to break into the house and carry him away. Charles rose from bed to get a glass of water. Then he opened a nightstand table to retrieve a straight razor. He had lived 52 years and spent most of them in struggle—with poverty, with his brother, with his own hardheadedness. He’d had a moment of glory and riches, but it was long since squandered. He had changed man’s relationship to the sea, yet had already been forgotten. Charles took the razor, drew it across his own neck, then fell back onto the bed and bled to death.

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11        

John was living in Whitstable when he learned that Charles had died. The London Morning Chronicle reported it under the headline

“suicide by the inventor of
the diving apparatus.”

“It appeared from the evidence that the deceased was by trade a caulker but did not follow his business and applied himself entirely to study and invention,” the article read. “The constant study had so affected his mind that he was twice confined to a lunatic asylum at Peckham.”

The brothers had been estranged for years but closely joined for much of their lives. They were reared in penury together, sailed the world together, invented together, and were rewarded with riches and fame together. They had revived the legacy of the Deanes as engineers and maritime icons, but that success had been clouded by madness, tragedy, and now the shame of suicide.

After so many years diving wrecks, John’s own family had come undone. His wife, Agnes, had long since died, in 1844. He’d been at sea when she passed, and his elder son had to sign the death certificate. Then, in the summer of 1852, John’s second son, Henry William, drowned while swimming in a London canal. With nobody else to care for them, John’s three daughters moved in with the family of Matthew Browning, John’s longtime friend and neighbor. When John returned to Whitstable, he too roomed in the Browning’s seaside cottage. It was a way to be close to his daughters, who had settled in comfortably with the Brownings.

The house was dimly lit and prone to flooding, but it had other, special charms for John, in particular Matthew’s pretty, young daughter, Sarah Ann. John was almost three decades older than Sarah, but it didn’t seem to matter. She was quickly taken with the worldly, wealthy adventurer and would sit quietly in the living room and listen as Matthew and John recounted their maritime exploits around the fire. Over time, John and Sarah grew closer. Sarah pitied John for the loss of his brother, wife, and son. She thought he needed caretaking and that she could give him comfort. Sarah was falling in love.

John could have married Sarah, of course. But for months he made no mention of matrimony. Instead they made the small, slow gestures of unspoken courtship between a middle-aged man and young woman in Victorian England, where intimacy smoldered at a distance. 

Sarah Ann Browning was 29 years younger
than John Deane.

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12       

The knock came on October 16, 1854. John was at home when a messenger delivered a letter from Sir Baldwin Walker, an admiral in the Royal Navy. The Kingdom needed John’s help at sea. Across the globe, Britain was deeply mired in the Crimean War, a conflict that set Russia against Britain, along with its French and Ottoman allies. This was the era of the Pax Britannica, the rise of an empire on which “the sun never set”—a colonial domain stretching across six continents and ruled with 1,000 ships from the most powerful navy in the history of the world. But Russia had been rapidly expanding its own empire, challenging British naval supremacy in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean. For Britain, this was a matter of power and national pride. The symbolic image of Britannia was a woman holding a trident—a new master of the sea. Yet here was Russia, challenging her from Sevastopol, a city on the Crimean Peninsula where it had built the largest port on the Black Sea.

Franz A. Roubaud’s 1904 panoramic painting depicts the carnage of the Crimean War.

The Crimean War was a kind of dress rehearsal for the disastrous conflicts of the 20th century: technological, lethally efficient, intractable. At sea, the Russians had kept the British at bay with new weapons: cannons armed with exploding shells that set traditional wooden ships on fire; and the first underwater mines, deployed throughout the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. As a result, the war soon ground to a bloody stalemate, a disaster for all parties. By the time John received the admiral’s letter, more than 150,000 people had died—some 600,000 would perish over the three years of the war—and the main front would soon settle into a lengthy, dismal siege of Sevastopol.

This was the matter at hand in Admiral Walker’s dispatch to John. The British navy could not approach Sevastopol because the Russians had scuttled their entire Black Sea Fleet at the mouth of the harbor. The casualties could mount indefinitely unless they were able to clear the wreckage. The navy needed John to dive the line of wrecks and destroy them with explosive charges.

John was 54, twice the age of the average soldier. He had never dived with other people’s lives at stake. And the task itself was daunting: He would be asked to plunge into the Black Sea in winter in the middle of a war. He’d have to tangle with explosives while war raged at the surface. But he was England’s most experienced diver and subaquatic munitions expert, and he’d been hand-picked for this mission. Pride and patriotic duty called.

He retrieved his dented copper helmet, and a month later, in November 1854, he was sailing for Crimea.

The mines were deployed in batches connected by insulated electrical wire, a sort of giant trip wire that extended for miles in the sea. John made his way to one of the mines. Wires stretched off into the distance, running a circuit to dozens of other mines and, somewhere out there, a Russian battery boat that powered the elaborate complex of booby traps. If the electric current was running, any false move could trigger a series of explosions that would kill John instantly and damage the British flotilla above him.

The water numbed John’s hands, making it difficult to handle the wires. He pulled a pair of cutters from his dive belt. It had been 21 years since he and Charles made that successful dive at the Royal George, when he watched Charles disappear down that rope ladder and then waited, looking for bubbles, until his brother gave a reassuring tug on the line. They’d survived then, and hundreds of other times since. But Charles had been gone for years, taken by madness, his life a tragedy. And now, John faced an unprecedented danger alone in a foreign sea. The Deane family had once helped build the Royal Navy, and now John was being asked to defend its power. No time on a lost wreck seeking treasure with his brother had more consequence than this moment, as John positioned the blades of his cutter around the wire that would either disarm the threat or detonate the nearby sea.

John cut the connection—and heard just the sound of his own breathing, the moment passing in  relief. The loose ends of the wire drifted to the bottom, and John severed the mine’s anchor rope so it could float like a balloon to the surface, where it would be easily dismantled by sailors above. The infernal machine was no longer a machine at all.

Around him in every direction were more mines, and he moved on to the next one, and another, and another, until the strait was cleared.

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14         

John Deane returned to Britain a hero. After he cleared the strait, the Allies took control of the waterways in the Crimea. They landed an army and intercepted Russian supplies, ending the siege of Sevastopol. Shortly after the fortified port city fell, Russia conceded defeat. It lost its naval presence in the Black Sea, and Britain overcame the war’s early humiliations to reemerge as the world’s greatest empire and naval power.

Back home, John was greeted by a celebratory press, which dubbed him the “infernal diver.” The Admiralty awarded him the prestigious Crimea Medal. The Deane family name, nearly forgotten, returned to the headlines. It was a long and strange legacy. Nearly two centuries earlier, John and Charles’ ancestors had designed and built the modern British navy. That navy had helped Britain defeat its European enemies, acquire its colonies, then create a vast empire to fuel the Industrial Revolution. It was in this time of invention that the Deane brothers’ mechanical marvel opened the depths of the sea to discovery and naval dominion. Then, when the might of British maritime power was challenged from below, John returned to assert the Deane presence. In the minds of many, John had played no small part in saving Britannia.

It was less than a month after John’s homecoming that he stood at the altar of St. Alphege Church in Whitstable, waiting for Sarah Ann Browning. The church stone stood gray and the oil lamps gladdened the wooden rafters above the altar. When Sarah appeared, she was accompanied by John’s own daughter, Agnes. During his nearly two-year stint at the front, Sarah had waited for him, distressed by his mission but believing in his abilities. When she learned he’d succeeded at sea and would come home, she’d hoped they’d marry. And John had returned from the depths and asked for her hand. Now she stood in taffeta and lace before her groom, and a fair wind blew in from the sea. John would have another chance at happiness, and he never wore the helmet again.

St. Alphege Church in Whitstable.